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Tuesday, December 18, 2012

Christmas in Connecticut

Christmas is a hard and heartrending season
for any who have recently experienced loss and bereavement, but perhaps no
Christmas will be harder than for some families in Newtown, Connecticut this
year. I refer of course to the horrifying
events there of December 14, when a gunman entered Sandy Hook Elementary School
around 9.30 in the morning and began shooting, leaving 26 victims dead, 20 of
whom were children between the ages of five and ten. Look again at the date of this disaster: it happened just ten short days before
Christmas Eve. No doubt the presents for
most the children there had already been bought by their parents, brightly
wrapped, and placed under the Christmas tree, awaiting the eager hands of the
children for whom they were intended to rip off the wrapping and open
them. For about 20 families in Newtown,
that anticipated happy moment will now never come. Christmas will not be merry in Connecticut
this year. One thinks not so much of the
story of the birth of Christ as of a darker part of the Christmas
narrative: “A voice was heard in Ramah,
wailing and lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children. She refused to be comforted, because they
were no more” (Mt. 2:18). This year the
Herodian slaughter of the Bethlehem innocents was seen in Newtown.

The
depth of the tragedy was reflected, I thought, in the pauses of the President,
when he spoke to the nation shortly after the events in his role as what one
journalist called the country’s “consoler in chief”. He spoke for just under four minutes, and yet
had to pause twice for some time to keep control of his emotions. Many times in that short address he wiped his
eyes. As he said at the beginning of the
speech, when he first heard the news that morning, he reacted “not as a
President, but as a parent”. The horror
afflicting Newtown reached out across the miles and seized us all—especially us
parents. Obviously no rhetoric can to do
justice to the immensity of the pain felt, and no words can assuage the
grief. But as Christians, what are we to
think?

First
of all, we think of our inter-connectedness.
The writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews bids his readers “remember
those who are in prison, as though in prison with them; and those who are
ill-treated, since you also are in the body” (Heb. 13:3). Everyone of us who remains “in the body”, who
shares bodily existence in this world, is connected to everyone else, and their
sorrows are somehow our sorrows as well.
We are not so many separate islands, living in splendid isolation from each
other, impervious to their pain. The
pain of Newtown is our pain as well, and in some sense, the slain are our
children too. At the very least, we need
to keep everyone there in our prayers.

This
human inter-connectedness finds is redemptive fulfillment in the Church as the
body of Christ. Of all the many
metaphors used to describe the Church—brotherhood, vine, city—the image of a
body holds pride of place in the New Testament.
And that means that we share a deep connection to our fellow
Christians—deeper than the bonds of brotherhood, deeper than the link between
two branches on the same vine, deeper than the unity of citizens in the same
city. In a word, we share the same
life. Just as the various limbs of a single
body share the same life and are therefore hurt by the same pain, so Christians
share life and pain with each other.
When a weight falls on one’s foot, it is not the foot alone which
suffers—the pain that landed there is diffused throughout the entire body, and all
the limbs respond by comforting the afflicted member. And when one of our fellow Christians
suffers, all of us are called to co-suffering.
“If one member suffers, all suffer together; if one member is honoured,
all rejoice together” (1 Cor. 12:26). In
the world and in the Church, we are all linked.
This Christmas, we all live in Newtown, Connecticut.

Secondly,
we remember that sin—all sin—is senseless.
God made us as rational beings, with the ability to think and reason,
striving to understand and make sense out of the varied world around us. We therefore rebel when we find something
that is altogether senseless and which outrages reason. The question “Why?” pushes itself to the
front, and we ask why this happened, how God could have allowed this. We instinctively seek to make sense of the
senseless. That is, I think, at least
partly behind the immediate response of looking for causes of the tragedy, and of
finding blame, and ways to fix it. Is
mental illness the cause? Is the problem
rooted in the availability of guns in the U.S.?
Do we need more security at our schools?
These are all valid questions, and the discussions around them should
take place. But these discussions cannot
sense out of the senseless. All sin is
essentially senseless, and perverse, and defies reason. We see this in the primordial defiance of
Satan. Consistent Christian tradition
portrays him as originally an angel who fell from grace, a being once perfect
like all the other angels, living in eternal bliss, but one who chose to rebel
against God’s rule and against love, choosing misery over bliss, and haughty,
hopeless defiance over blessed submission.
Why? Such a choice, once made
before the creation of the world, was irrevocable, and made no sense. Yet all sin partakes something of this
senseless defiance, and therefore eludes any attempt to understand it. We can never hope to truly understand such
sin as came into focus Friday morning December 14. The way forward is not through reason, but
through God’s consolation.

Healing
here comes not through trying to use this tragedy to make better laws (though
that is in itself a good thing), not by making this a tragedy to end of all
tragedies, as the first world war was the war to end all wars. Healing comes through the embrace of Christ,
letting our tears run down our cheeks to rest on His shoulders. God does not offer us adequate explanation in
this age. He offers us Himself. In running into His arms, we can find some
peace.

But
(as a final point), some kinds of peace and healing can only be found in the
age to come. Some hurts are too deep,
some shocks too traumatic, to be dealt with while we live in the body. Of course we will go on with our lives—there
are other children to care for, and jobs to do, and joys to experience, and
people to love. Life does not end, even
after something as terrible at December 14 in Newtown, Connecticut. But, I suspect, some tears remain, and refuse
to be dried. Some pain persists,
until the dying breath. Behind the masks
that society and convention rightly bid us wear, the heart’s open wound still
bleeds, and nothing in this age can help it.
But healing does come eventually for those who seek their healing in
God.

In
the Apocalypse (addressed as it originally was to people who were experiencing
persecution, and death, and bereavement), a final healing is promised. St. John saw in the Kingdom a great multitude
which no man could number, standing before the throne of God and the Lamb. He was told, “He who sits on the throne will
shelter them with His Presence, for the Lamb will be their shepherd and He will
guide them to springs of living water, and God will wipe away every tear from
their eyes” (Rev. 7:15f)—yes, even the tears shed at Christmas time in Newtown,
Connecticut. We all of us will one day
have to pass through the dark door of death, and step into the age to
come. Some of us will step through that
door with tear-stained faces, and with wounded and weary hearts. But there we will healing at last, and hearts
will be lightened, and all tears forever wiped away.

In
thinking of that day, I am reminded of a description of it by C.S. Lewis, found
in the closing lines of his Narnian
Chronicles. The great lion, Aslan,
greeted the children as they stepped through the door of death. “He said to them, ‘All of you are—as you used
to call it in the Shadowlands—dead. The
term is over: the holidays have
begun. The dream is ended: this is the morning.’ And as He spoke He no longer looked to them
like a lion, but the things that began to happen after that were so great and
beautiful that I cannot write them. And
for us this is the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they
all lived happily ever after. But for
them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their
adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One
of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on forever: in which every chapter is better than the one
before.”

This
is the real hope for Rachel, weeping for her children—a new morning, and a
reunion, and a new story, and a Kingdom.
That story will go on forever.
And every chapter in it will indeed be better than the one before.

2 comments:

Perhaps the worst pain is having to accept that we will never know why Adam Lanza committed his atrocities. He left no manifesto or suicide note. He left no blog or status update on a social networking site. We're only faced with a pitch blackness of no explanation and no reason for why this happened. There's a lot of conjectures and hypotheses, none of which can be verified. The social and political debates are perhaps just a way of ignoring the void that lies at the centre of this catastrophe.

Fr. Lawrence on Ancient Faith:

BUY the book

Fr. L. at oca.org

Followers

Father Lawrence Farley holds an M.Div.from Wycliffe College, Toronto School of Theology, and also completed a Certificate program at St. Tikhon's Seminary.

Since 1987 he has served as the pastor of St. Herman's Orthodox Church, OCA (Archdiocese of Canada) in Langley BC. Several priests, deacons, and lay members of new missions have emerged from the membership of St. Herman's.